Death and Distance

Tears down the phone from a thousand miles away, the final call to tell of my dad’s death. The weird twilight hours afterwards, a quick flurry of phone calls, guilt for bearing bad news, the huge, safe embrace of my husband, endless nose-blowing on bits of kitchen roll. Then sleep, that dreamless sleep of exhaustion, the sleep at the end of a chapter when all that has come with it has gone.

I don’t know how I feel, yet. There’s a deep loss, somewhere in my heart, but it is familiar and sits alongside the one I’ve become used to every single day since he left our family years ago. A raw grief is smoothed by that familiar ache, and although this is final it doesn’t seem new. At arms length for years, and the same at the end.

I thought I’d feel a peace, where the years spent alongside that younger self that couldn’t understand why we weren’t good enough could start to be put to bed. But I hold it still, alongside the ‘should have, could haves’ a death brings to us all. I am glad, in the end, that he found his place, with love around him, community, new family. I know he loved us too, and maybe things could have been different, but maybe they could not. We visited last year, in a previous time of ill health, and it helped me begin to let go a little. It wasn’t my place, any more, as it hadn’t been for years. The visit helped me to realise that.

I can’t really sum up the last few decades, and it probably isn’t the best time to. Writing it out helps a little, to name those intangible feelings flitting around every part of my body. Acceptance of the stark fact that at the end, it was no longer our story. A resignation to that, and a squeeze of the hand to the part of me that tries too hard to please, to be heard.

Alongside those things that run deep, there are the weird little things that catch me off guard – I’ll miss the exchange of endless desert rain frog pictures, spherical animals and the occasional political meme. Childhood memories pop into my mind from simpler, happier times- being swung around and around on the cricket pitch, washing a car in our old cottage in a time where only a few cars parked on the steep road. Secretly eating ready brek dry out of the packet in the kitchen of that same cottage. Bopping his head on the lampshade every night after saying goodnight. A gaggle of kids in the back of a van with no seats, tumbling around corners.

In later years, being in the passenger seat of that same van, watching the road rush by through the hole in the floor. Him teaching me how to reverse hill-start at the golf club and nearly crashing into a golf buggy, going to the driving range and me being terrible but having great fun. The way we made fun of his finger twitching just before making a shot at pool. Frowning at me having a pint at the pub but being fine with having two half pints. Him borrowing his mate’s Alfa 156 and tearing up the local dual carriageway – and in later years, letting him drive my own Alfa round twisting Pennine roads at terrifying speeds.

Like my husband says, whilst placing a finger on my forehead – those memories live on, inside us. The good, the bad, the painful, the hopeful. All the ingredients that make a life. The next few weeks will be weird – a funeral in a different country. A distance, a closeness, and a distance again.

I’m not sure how to end this, and I’m not sure there is an end. But for now, words help, writing helps, keeping busy helps. I know that initial shock will settle and that time will continue to beat on. I sleep, and wake, and sleep again, and carry him in my mind. In this final distance, there is still closeness.